Menu

The Net – The Outer Limits – The Music Biz – Film 95 – tape 1999

It’s Tape: 1999. Slightly disappointing there’s no Space: 1999 to go with it, but you can’t have everything.

This tape opens with the trailer for Modern Times about adoption.

Then, the first in a new series of The Net. Where are today’s programmes like this? Probably hidden away on the Discovery Channel somewhere.

The programme looks at how the Church of Scientology clamps down on dissenters online, in this case the former scientologist Dennis Erlich. It’s probably bigoted of me to say that their attorney just looks evil?

It’s really a story about copyright and the internet, but it’s the scientologists who are asserting copyright on their materials. +1 for the mention of the alt.religion.scientology internet newsgroup. I spent a lot of time on newsgroups in the 90s.

Benjamin Woolley tells us how to create a home page on the world wide web. So many memories. To get photos on teh web he had to ‘have them developed’ and put on a Photo CD. I Remember Photo CDs. Kodak’s attempt to own digital photography that didn’t last more than a couple of years before simple JPEGs became the norm.

A lot of time is spent on editing ‘hotspots’ on a photograph to create links. That was state of the art in those days, and the way many sites worked (or didn’t, given how user hostile image maps were).

Dave Rowntree from Blur looks at music on the web. “As modem speeds stand at the moment it’s simply not practical to download sound of decent quality but as modem speeds improve it is going to be more and more of a worry.”

There’s a piece about modern devices, and how they don’t talk to each other and are hard to use, and how future devices would be more attuned to people. Enter Thad Starner wearing an MIT prototype of the kind of thing that became Google Glass.

His colleague Steve Mann has a less ergonomic version.

“I’m just updating my menu now. I keep it online so that people can see what they might want to eat when they come here with me.” You’re not fooling anyone. Nobody is going to lunch with you while you’re wearing that.

Laura Ross doesn’t want something covering up her head. She shows off her phone, built into a charming half-mitten.

You can respond to the programme over IRC – that’s what we had before Twitter.

Then, the first episode of The Music Biz, a refreshingly frank documentary about the business of pop music.

It talks to a lot of people, including Aimee Mann

Bruce Springsteen

Jon Bon Jovi

Michael Hutchence

Rick Wakeman

Billy Joel

All these artists are telling the same story. Their contracts were terrible, and they all regretted signing them.

Then we meet the managers, like Tom Watkins

The stories told here are horrible. The programme went out at about the time that George Michael was trying to get out of his Sony contract, so he appears, although not as an interiview subject. I think a month is enough time that this shouldn’t count in the blog’s Death Watch, but I felt I should mention it anyway.

4 comments

Shouldn’t that be alt.cult.scientology? I used to like newsgroups until they were taken over by fascistic conspiracy theorists, masturbators and the hopelessly insane. I think Google wiped all the old threads, billions of them presumably, and replaced them with moderated fare.

I wonder if those awful contracts were as horrible as the graphic design in that music documentary?

Stupid road bumps meant I posted the above (from my phone) when it wasn’t finished. Anyway, I hope the cinema wasn’t the one at Staples Corner, as it closed down last year. And guess which one is/was the nearest one to me…